A relatively small area of the North Platte River in Nebraska hosts a massive migration of sandhill cranes every year.

Tribune photo by Steve Moseley

Steve Moseley

• 
• 

When my wife Norma and I moved from Powell back to Nebraska, the state of our birth, we knew we’d miss your neck of the woods before we even left. And we sure do.

As for me, I miss the great friends and Powell Tribune coworkers we left behind in the best town in which I will ever live. No brag, just fact.

You immediately made us welcome. This was due in no small part, I believe, to the fact we did not march into your midst and begin telling you your business. I saw other ‘outsiders’ gallop into town and attempt to bend Wyoming and specifically Powell to their pre-conceived notions.

They did so to their detriment. It turns out people you openly mock are reluctant to do business with you. The most obnoxious of them were soon gone.

Beyond Powell our favorite haunts were the Bighorns, Beartooths and of course Yellowstone.

Speaking of those magic places and others like them, our second favorite season every year was the one dawning now. Spring is what I’m talking about.

I miss exploring everything from tiny Five Springs campground and falls just above Lovell (Ever been there? If not, what a shame) to the massive Yellowstone ecosystem in its entirety.

Those first few trips through the East Gate of the park around-about Mother’s Day were anticipated with relish. It wasn’t all fully open yet — more like serpentine highway tunnels carved from the deep snow — but the magic was already palpable.

Later, when Mother Nature loosened her grip a bit, the bears began marauding to fill their bellies, bison cows dropped their reds on the ground and elk calves seemed to appear everywhere at once.

All was right with the world. That is, the world we were blessed to live in then.

Not so much though here on the Great (tee-hee) Plains.

With one notable exception — and it’s a biggie — Nebraska in spring does not hold a flickering candle to northwest Wyoming. We have no resident moose, just the odd bull that wanders alone and lost over the endless corn stubble every few years. There are zero free roaming bison, scant few elk, pronghorn or bighorn sheep and no mountain goats at all.

What we do have every single spring, and have had since eons before human history began, is cranes by the hundreds of thousands. And they’re here right now, just up the interstate west of our house.

Are you familiar with the Central Flyway? Chances are not given Wyoming is not located dead-square in its bull’s-eye. Like the biggest hourglass you could conjure, the flyway funnels sandhill cranes, and a few whooping cranes, from South America, Texas, Mexico and similar southern environs each spring to breeding grounds in Alaska, Canada, the far northern U.S. and even Siberia, if you can believe that.

The one and only place they stop for significant rest and nutrition on the entire course of this epic migration is right here along miles and miles of the Platte River. People you’d expect to know tell us 80% of the global population of sandhill cranes travel though what is now my backyard every spring.

Fossils prove without doubt the birds remain anatomically just as they were in the era of dinosaurs, making them a true, living and breathing prehistoric species. Epically noisy, too, when you hide very near several thousand as they wake up in the morning on their safe sandbar roosts. Their trill must be heard to be fully appreciated.

This year’s spectacle is just beginning to roll, but already my cameras and I have gone among them five times. There are sure to be more crane safaris until the end of April by which time pickins’ will be slim.

Already this season I have chatted with and answered questions for folks from as far distant as Rhode Island and seen a dizzying variety of state license plates. The whole shebang is really quite something for Nebraska, where the international tourism destination bar is understandably low by comparison to Wyoming.

Grand though it be, however, we get cranes just two months a year, perhaps a teensy bit more if the weather doesn’t implode. That’s it.

But not you. No siree. You get Yellowstone and all your other neighborhood natural wonders 12 months a year. Every year.

I tell ya folks, it just ain’t fair.

Oh, before I forget, I hear you asking, “Hey, Steve, what northwest Wyoming season do you miss most if spring is second?”

The answer is fall. But happy to report we’re booked for a “fix of fall” in September. Can’t get here soon enough.